By Mary DeGroat | Director, Development & Marketing
Read to Me Project (RtMP) is having a significant impact on underprivileged children facing academic challenges and preschoolers who might otherwise enter school unprepared for learning to read. Thanks to your generous donation, young learners are gaining an equal opportunity to excel in school and their older siblings are benefiting as well. The positive changes unfolding in their lives are not only shaping academic progress but will extend to a successful future. At the mid-year point of the current 2023/2024 program year, 1,742 4th-6th grade students and 1,109 little ones ages 6 months to 5 years old, and 20 teen parents are participating in the program. 83% are located in South Monterey County, 17% in Salinas, California.
RtMP’s purpose is to provide preschoolers in no/low literate families with the essential foundation of early literacy. RtMP prepares pre-school aged children to start school on par with their peers, primed for learning to read, while student participants are improving their reading skills.
One teacher describes the benefits this way: "RtMP is designed to develop early literacy for pre-k children, but in doing so it also covers upper-grade common core reading standards. For example, when the students read to their little ones using “Read to Me Project’s 9 Best Ways to Read to Young Children,” they are practicing Reading Literature Standard 5.7: Which is to analyze how visual elements contribute to the meaning, tone, or beauty of a text. Even though the RtMP books are not necessarily for the fifth-grade level, the connections the student makes are a fifth-grade standards and better prepare students to make these same connections when reading fifth-grade level text while in class. In other words, students are practicing most of the reading literature standards when participating in the RtMP. The reading content isn’t at grade level, it’s for the little ones at home, but that doesn’t matter. The connections made when reading, analyzing, and discussing the text and illustrations with their little one is important to the overall comprehension of the standards and better prepare the students for grade-level reading. “
At the beginning of the school year, RtMP program coordinators explain to classes of students in simple terms how babies learn through the senses and that their brains are sparked by added information. That information is later connected to corresponding words for concepts and items. The students hear that their own brains spark too when they learn something new. It’s an exciting “Cool!,” “Aha!” moment for those students that inspires them to want to keep learning.
RtMP also delivers crucial training to parents with limited literacy skills, equipping them with tools and information to foster their young child's literacy development.
To-date, the Read to Me Project has impacted more than 23,500 children from low-literate families.
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